A Poster, A Probe And IIT Mandi’s Golden Chance To Define A Standard

IIT Mandi has ordered an inquiry into a poster displayed on campus during Janmashtami celebrations on September 4. The poster described the four varnas in functional terms. Brahmanas were to spread God’s message. Kshatriyas were to protect society and spirituality. Vaishyas were to drive the economy and support others. Shudras were to serve the higher classes. The institute has since confiscated the poster and decided to refer the matter to the police after its fact-finding exercise. The nine-member committee, headed by Prof. Viswanath Balakrishna, includes six members from the institute’s reservation cell. It has not yet identified the student who put up the poster.

Director Laxmidhar Behera has said the poster was a student-led initiative and that he had not seen it before the controversy. He has also said that the institute stands firmly against caste discrimination. He has pointed to his long association with the Bhagavad Gita and Iskcon, which he says strongly opposes caste discrimination, and explained varna in terms of guna and karma rather than birth. That defence deserves to be considered. The guna-karma reading of varna is a genuine Gaudiya Vaishnava position. If varna is understood as temperament and vocation rather than hereditary rank, the poster could be defended as theology rather than bigotry.

However, that defence has a real limit. Whatever the tradition intends, the poster did not present a claim about temperament. It presented a claim about class, in the language of “higher classes” and who must “serve” them, tied to birth categories that Indian law and Indian social memory treat as a hierarchy of status rather than a distribution of aptitude. A theological reading available to a scholar is not automatically the reading a poster communicates to students walking past it. In other words, the institute’s defence explains what the tradition can mean. It does not establish what the poster, as displayed, did mean.

That brings us to the more useful question. In January 2026, the UGC notified regulations requiring higher education institutions to establish Equity Committees and formal mechanisms for addressing discrimination. The Supreme Court subsequently put the regulations in abeyance, and the Centre later told the Court that they were being reconsidered. The legal position, therefore, remains unsettled. Even so, that uncertainty does not make the underlying institutional responsibility disappear. Caste discrimination in higher education is not a hypothetical concern. The regulatory push itself emerged from wider concerns about discrimination and exclusion on campuses. A public institution cannot reasonably wait for every regulatory question to be settled before deciding what standards of equality, dignity, and non-discrimination it should apply to its own campus.

Indeed, IIT Mandi’s own reservation cell serves as a redressal mechanism for SC, ST, OBC, and PwD students and employees, including complaints of caste-based harassment, humiliation, and discriminatory behaviour. Its chairperson, Prof. Viswanath Balakrishnan, is also heading the current fact-finding committee. Against this background, the present inquiry becomes particularly important. The institute has moved beyond distancing itself from the poster. It has confiscated the material, begun a fact-finding exercise, and decided to involve the police. That is a significant response. However, identifying the person responsible is only one part of the problem.

The first question, therefore, is who created and approved the poster before it was printed and displayed, and whether any existing approval process for student events was followed. The preliminary finding that the Janmashtami programme was organised by students rather than by an institute department is relevant. However, it does not by itself settle the question of institutional responsibility.

The next question is whether any faculty member was consulted about, or aware of, the poster’s content before it was displayed. This is a fair question to ask, not an accusation to presume the answer to. It should be answered by the inquiry rather than left to public speculation.

More broadly, the institute needs to establish whether this was an isolated lapse or whether its procedures allow potentially discriminatory material to appear in student activities without adequate oversight. This does not mean students should be prevented from discussing controversial ideas. A university must allow such discussion. The real issue is whether there is a meaningful distinction between discussing a contested idea in an academic setting and presenting a formulation that appears to assign different social worth and obligations to people based on caste.

That distinction becomes even more relevant because IIT Mandi has faced another controversy in recent months over a conference involving the Bhagavad Gita, Ayurveda, and reincarnation. The institute denied allegations that students were compelled to attend the event. This does not establish a pattern of discrimination, but it does make a review of institutional procedures reasonable.

Finally, the institute needs to explain what it will do after the investigation. A police inquiry can establish whether an individual committed an offence. It cannot by itself answer whether IIT Mandi’s own procedures were adequate. The institute should therefore, as far as legally possible, make public what its internal inquiry finds about how the poster reached the campus, what safeguards existed, and what changes will follow. The central question raised by this episode is, therefore, not simply what the Gita says about varna. It is whether a premier public institution has the mechanisms to distinguish between the academic study of a contested religious idea and the unexamined display of language that can reasonably be experienced as caste hierarchy. IIT Mandi has now begun a serious inquiry. The standard it sets for itself will depend on how it uses the answers.

P. John J. Kennedy is former professor and dean, Christ University, Bengaluru